How to Prevent Serious Eye Injury at Work Using Multiple Different Approaches

It’s important to do everything you can to prevent eye injury if you’re in a situation where you’ll be working with potentially dangerous materials. This especially applies to areas where there’s a risk for impact. Fortunately, there are various types of safety glasses that can help prevent this problem, and you can combine this with other methods of cutting down on the chances you’ll get a serious injury.

Keep Everything Visible

One of the most important things you can do when it comes tom protecting your eyes at the workplace is ensuring that you have a full view of everything at all times. This means, for example, making sure that you have a pair of prescription safety glasses and not just the generic glasses. This is because one of the best ways to avoid danger at the workplace is prevention, and you can only do this if you can see everything clearly.

That’s why it’s also important to make sure you continually clean your glasses with microfiber. The exact frequency you should use for cleaning the glasses will depend on your work, of course. Obviously, it’s a good idea to make sure that you clean them off any kind of dirt or other foreign material gets on them, but once per day is another good precept to follow.

Additionally, you’re going to want to vacuum off your eyeglasses if there’s too much for just a rag to handle, and as an additional level of cleanliness. Plus, your glasses aren’t going to help very much if it turns out that you keep rubbing your eyes after getting them dirty, so it’s important to have access to water and other options for keeping your hands clean after they get dirty. Your eye protection can’t protect you from your own hands, after all.

Additionally, it’s important to make sure that any eye protection you wear doesn’t fog up. This is an issue if you’re wearing goggles since there won’t be any ventilation. In the case of more standard glasses with a safety rating, it may trouble you less. Some glasses come with special anti-fogging options inside so this could be worth looking into. In the case where you’re wearing some kind of larger safety goggles over regular glasses, you also have to worry about them becoming dislodged.

Workplace Awareness and Information

Another strong way to stay clear of serious eye injuries in the workplace is just being generally aware of both the most common dangers of this generally, and aware specifically of what they are at work. For example, According to Prevent Blindness, one of the leading causes of eye injuries at work is flying objects of whatever type, including bits of metal and glass. Others include smaller particles or dangerous tools.

It could be anything really, from sparks off of a factory tool to wood pieces coming off of a saw. In general, however, mostly you just need to know where the tools are located in the workplace so that if something happens, you won’t be surprised. Sometimes a bit of wood catches a saw blade just right and flies off, but the maybe the vast majority of the time it doesn’t. If you’re only going by what you see happen, you might end up with a false sense of security.

Situational awareness is often the best kind of preventative measure. This is especially the case of the way things work at work is complicated. For example, there could be different areas that require different protective measures. If it’s possible to wear one type of gear that protects against them all, this would obviously be the best approach, but this might not always be the case. That’s why you have to make sure you’re paying attention to the fact that you may need to put on extra goggles when you head into a chemical area of the workplace, and then take it off again when leaving and heading to an area that requires better vision, for example.

Types of Glasses

There are a number of different options available for safety glasses. For example, you can go with those that have a plastic lens type. The advantages here are that you have to worry less about them steaming up and that they work well against welding sparks. They also tend to be less heavy on your face which can be an issue if you have to wear them for a very long time. The issue is if you need to protect against stronger potential issues than that, especially anything that could scratch the lenses like flying metal because they aren’t as tough as the other types.

Another option is to go with glasses that are made out of polycarbonate for the lenses. These are also nice and light and are less likely to fog as well. Plus, they are one of the strongest lenses commonly available, so if your work area is prone to serious impact risk, this could be your best bet. In fact, it’s been said that they are particularly good at resisting impact and shattering.

Additionally, you could go with a straight up glass lens type which tends to be more resistant to being scratched. Plus, this is the only type that can incorporate prescriptions right into them. That way you don’t need to wear contacts or other glasses underneath the protective gear. Many of them are also more resistant to chemicals that might occur at work.

Have First Aid on Hand

It’s always a good idea to make sure that you have the materials necessary to tend to any problem occurring at work on hand just in case. Depending on your type of work, this could either be something you have in your pocket or in a case you keep at your side, or it could be in your car, a locker, or somewhere else nearby. This is going to be especially important in the case where your work doesn’t have adequate first aid solutions nearby. This is always worth checking, particularly if there’s any eye risk.

What you need is going to include a cold compress, tape, gauze, and other materials directly related to eye injuries. Obviously, it’s important to wear safety glasses, but even if you do, safety glasses aren’t going to be invincible to all potential impacts. Most of them have an upper limit rating, and you never know when you’re going to get a surprise that no one could have predicted, really.

Depending on the type of work, there should be an expectation for what type of threats exist, however. That’s why it’s important to make sure that you get glasses that match that rating. For example, if it’s known that sometimes flecks of metal fly off of the work for at 600 meters per second, then you need to verify that the safety glasses you have feature an impact rating that’s at least high enough to accommodate that.

The first aid is just in case on top of that. This way you’re covered no matter what happens and you can rest a bit easier at night.

For more information about using prescription safety glasses and other protective gear to protect your eyes from all manner of different possible threats, as well as other related topics, please make sure you go ahead and contact us today.